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This is the third post in a series examining how targets of harassment in scientific communities have chosen to respond to it. Read part one and part two.

Despite the harms of harassment to its immediate targets and the entire scientific community, individuals have lots of reasons not to report it. But silence does nothing to address the larger problem.

The challenge of harassment for scientific communities and for individual scientists is that responses that would be best for individual scientists are not necessarily the best for the community as a whole, while responses that would help the community as a whole can be harmful to individuals figuring out their own best response to being harassed.

Hypothetically, rooting out all harassment is a goal most scientists would endorse. However, actually dealing with non-hypothetical harassers causes pain to the scientists who have to do it, and a significant amount of that pain can end up on the targets of the harassers.

Individually, doing nothing can seem like a more rational choice than doing something. Keep your head down and do your work. Pretend it never happened. And yet, the cumulative effect of all the rational individual decisions to do nothing means that within the scientific community nothing gets done about harassment.

However, some of the individual scientists who have experienced harassment find moments where the scales are tipped in favor of what is good for the scientific community — and, they hope, for themselves in the long term. Some individual scientists see the potential for harm to themselves and still decide, rationally or not, that it’s worth demanding justice and helping the scientific community get a little closer to the state it should be in.

Here, I present more accounts of harassment in scientific settings. Interviewees identified only by a single name (a pseudonym) have asked to remain anonymous.

* * * * *

Nicola Gaston, a Principal Investigator a the MacDiarmid Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, describes her experience of sexual harassment in science as not particularly special. Only once did it involve physical assault, by a colleague in a stairwell after an evening conference session. “I remember thinking that one through after getting away: I did not work with the man directly; I knew he had a wife and small children; I did not expect to run into him again after moving to my next job,” she told me. “But the key factor was that he was not in any position of power over me, and so I felt that the assault was professionally inconsequential, and it was a one-off.”

Gaston describes the assault as “the only time that I really thought about reporting.” But she was working in a country that wasn’t her own and was unclear what the institutional policies on sexual harassment were. Sorting out the process for making a complaint hardly seemed worth it for a one-off.

The more common experience for Gaston was unwanted sexual advances from colleagues, made with the suggestion that she should be grateful for their interest. She notes, “It was easy to dismiss as people just being creeps — awkward male scientist syndrome — but it was definitely the sort of thing that, had it come from someone with any seniority, would have made life very difficult for me.” One thing Gaston identifies as making her less vulnerable than she might have been was her independent funding — she didn’t depend on any of the men coming on to her to materially support her research. But she also acknowledges an element of self-protection in not reporting harassment, a desire to move on from an incident and forget it happened.

Now that Gaston advises students in her field, she finds herself worrying about this approach. “Often, from the point of view of individual students it makes no sense to report one-off occasions of harassment — and yet, a collection of these ‘minor’ incidents which may each be one-offs (as far as the specific harasser is concerned), in aggregate causes real damage.”

* * * * *

Abbie recounts an unexpected campaign of bullying by a colleague senior to her. For reasons that are still not entirely clear to Abbie, this colleague insisted that she and another female junior member of their department faculty sign off on a thesis neither had had a chance to read. Both women declined, insisting that they would need to read the thesis before signing off. The man responded by telling them both, “Your lives will get hard. You’re going to get into trouble.”

The women agreed that this seemed like a threat, so they consulted with their department chair, who told them to take the matter to Human Resources. HR took a report and informed the women that, under whistleblower laws, retaliation was illegal. The women were informed that meetings would be arranged to discuss the matter with the colleague who had made the threat and with the department chair, but that the process didn’t allow the officials to tell the women anything about what transpired in these meetings.

Then, as promised, the man who had demanded that Abbie sign of on the thesis made her professional life hard.

Abbie and the other complainant were hard at work on a grant renewal for their department, one which would have provided research support for faculty and students, as well as new equipment and start-up funds for a new faculty member. The colleague they reported persuaded the department chair to withdraw his support from the project. The grant didn’t get funded.

The man took to yelling at Abbie during faculty meetings. The chair made no moves to intervene because, the chair said, “that’s just how he is.” Indeed, Abbie learned that the chair was telling other members of the department that she was a “troublemaker” because she had made the complaint — even though it was the chair himself who told Abbie to report it.

Her department chair, who Abbie expected would try to help her career, spent nearly a year actively working to harm it because of the efforts of the man who tried to make his colleagues sign off on a thesis without reading it.

Despite the retaliation she experienced, Abbie says she doesn’t regret making an official report. “There’s a record of it. There’s a letter in his file about it. And, over the years, as it became apparent to literally everyone that he has a pattern of bullying virtually every female junior faculty member and any student he has power over, the fact that I didn’t hide it and actively fought against it became a point in my favor.”

But while Abbie is now respected for standing her ground against his bullying, she doesn’t like to think about what might have happened if she hadn’t had some senior colleagues and administrators in her corner, where she expected her department chair to be.

* * * * *

Ellen knows many women in science with experiences like these, and estimates that only one in ten reports. The reasons she has heard for choosing not to report are familiar ones: fear of having an advanced degree or career derailed despite the time and effort invested in it, fear of retaliation (whether professional or legal) by the harasser or the institution, lack of trust in official processes and in the people charged with carrying them out. There is also the self-doubt targets of harassment experience: Did I somehow invite the behavior? Is it really harassment if there was no physical contact, or if it started consensually? And, targets have the fear that if they report, the harassment will become the thing that defines them in their scientific field — not their talent, not their discoveries, but the thing that someone else did to them.

I spoke to other scientists who had stories of harassment but didn’t want to share them for this piece for exactly the reasons Ellen cites. Some said that, even years later, they worried that their harassers would find ways to retaliate that be almost impossible to prove. Others said that as they were finding success in their scientific fields they did not want to have their experience of harassment eclipse their scientific achievements in the minds of their colleagues. These scientists were clear that harassment was a problem in science, but given current conditions they didn’t want to make their experience of harassment part of the conversation about the size and shape of the problem, or what might be done to solve it.

If we act as though harassment is par for the course, as if the price of access to scientific workplaces and scientific interactions is unwanted touching, sexual advances, sexually explicit banter, insults, bullying, discrimination, we are placing an extra price on the targets of harassment to be included.

The presumption that this is OK, that they should put up with it rather than making a fuss and creating extra bureaucratic tasks, is really a presumption that the scientific community belongs to the harassers. It’s a presumption that the targets should accept this treatment as the price of admission, or leave.

Why do targets of harassment elect to report or otherwise speak out about this treatment, even knowing what it might cost them to do so? Because they want to do science in a community whose members are committed to treating each other with respect. Because they believe that knowledge-builders are also capable of living up to standards of professionalism. Because they are unwilling to let science belong to harassers.